Efficient and Lightweight Time Synchronization Technique for IoT Devices Using Randomized Synchronization Tokens

Clock synchronization is an important challenge in the Internet of Things (IoT), especially for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It refers to aligning the timekeeping of multiple devices or systems to a common reference time. It ensures the accuracy and reliability of the collected data, which are often used for critical applications, such as environmental monitoring or security. However, clock synchronization techniques can significantly impact sensor resources, including energy consumption and computing power. In this paper, we present a novel clock synchronization approach for WSNs, especially for low-resource networks. To minimize energy consumption and address the constraint of limited computing resources of nodes, we randomly select a subset of neighbors, in contrast to existing methods which consider all neighbors. Subsequently, each node selects half of the values from the chosen nodes to compute the clock average. Finally, the node adjusts its clock to the computed average. Experimental evaluation results show that the system achieves synchronization after 4 iterations and requires only one additional iteration when 10% of nodes are malicious. The proposed technique reduces the influence of malicious nodes, storage space, computation time, and energy consumption, which is important for IoT applications.